Hi, welcome to the first Devlog of this game project!

First a little bit about us, we are a team of 5 working on a new game project. And hope you will find this Devlog as instructive as was this first week of prototyping for us.

In this first week we've been prototyping game mechanics in UE4 and Unity. By doing so we  focused on several things as finding the best engine and how we could improve with visual studio and P4V in UE4.  Beside that we are prototyping a first reverse in time mechanic and did serval researches on other game mechanics. One of the first things we had to research was how animations would work in UE4. Then how we could randomized the room's sequence in Unity. And as last but not leas we researched how different enemy types would behave in the different engines. During this first week of prototyping we agreed on continuing to prototype in Unity but we will mainly focus on working and researching in UE4.

Reverse in time prototype

First off we had the idea of doing a reversing in time mechanic like how they did in the game Prince of Persia, so we started testing how we could do it in UE4, so we started by saving the rotation and position every few frames. But the next step was looking how we can access the animation data to see what animation was playing at the time but we encountered an issue that we didn't really find how to do this so now we're opting to changing this mechanic to more of a tracer reverse in time that were we  would play an animation and teleport the player back x amount of seconds. If we find in a different faze of development how we can access the animation data we could still change this mechanic to the ability of Ekko ( in league of legends) chronobreak.

Generate random rooms

For this prototype we wanted to see how we would generate the room sequences in Unity. We researched mechanics in other games and decided to use premade rooms that will be attached to each other. Those rooms will appear in a random sequence which will give many different iterations of the game. This mechanic made us think about the room models and the transitions between the rooms. For the moment we would like to use a fade in/out or no transition and a whole loaded game. This decision will be made in the near future.

Animation Prototype

We did some research on how the animation system works in general, we looked on how blendspaces worked in UE4, what montages are and how we would use this to our advantage on making a good combat system. We decided to use the montage system so we can trigger notify events to enable and disable collision of the melee weapon and how we can combo animations also by using notify events. We also looked at making animations in Mixamo and importing them to UE4.

Enemy type research

• Emphasizers:
  • Emphasizers are enemies which emphasize a certain mechanic. They encourage players to use specific attacks or abilities against them, yet at the same time it still possible to take them out by regular means.
• Enforcers: 
  • Enforcers are enemies which force the player to use a specific mechanic to defeat them. This means the player can only defeat them using these specific mechanics, with the other mechanic having little or (more often) no effect.
• Smashers: 
  • Smashers are enemies which can easily be defeated and allow the player to have fun smashing them up.
• Challengers:
  • Challengers Are tougher enemies which are meant to challenge the player and test their skills.